Craig plays an American expat living indolently in Mexico City in this sometimes uproarious adaptation of William Burroughs’ autobiographical novel
– needy, horny, moody, like his Knives Out detective Benoit Blanc on steroids and with something of his portrayal of Ted Hughes from 2003’s Sylvia., directed by Luca Guadagnino and wonderfully shot by cinematographer Sayombhu Mukdeeprom with digitally rendered landscapes and streetscapes that bring the boozy, bleary reality into alignment with the many dream sequences.
Craig is Lee, an expatriate American based on Burroughs himself – the resemblance is made more overt in a Kubrickian sequence giving him a succession of hallucinatory flashforwards into old age. Lee lives cheaply and indolently in Mexico City after the second world war, hanging around bars, drinking, doing drugs and picking up guys – he is queer, and the word here might complicate still further the issue of when the word shed its derogatory overtones.
Together they go on a weird holiday to South America, because Lee wants to try the fabled hallucinogen yage, or ayahuasca, because he’s heard it gives the user telepathic powers and – poignantly enough – he wants to discover what Gene really thinks and feels about him.
Guadagnino shows that this is an eroticism of the streets: Lee spends so much of his time walking from bar to bar, or – with a guy – from a bar to a hotel. He hangs out with other guys in the same situation as him, chiefly the witty, dyspeptic Frank , but Lee is special: he seems more like an artist, although whatever artistry this is, it appears, like Wilde’s genius, to be put into his life, or his bed.
It is a really funny, open, generous performance – perhaps the only disadvantage is that he upstages Starkey, just a little, and his mesmeric screen presence will draw our attention back to Lee, away from Gene and his ambiguous intentions and emotions. Craig is so dominant that sometimes it seems that Gene is almost not worthy of him. Craig is strangely magnificent.
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